Aardvarks of Gor
1 o'clock, April 1, 2004
Courtesy of Brandon “no web presence” Dudley, a truly bizarre Onion AV Club interview (that link will stop working next week; if it doesn’t work, this might, though it doesn’t at the moment) with Dave Sim of Cerebus: a clear contender for Most Screwed-Up Canadian In History. Highlights:
[Cerebus is] the longest sustained narrative in human history
I’m not sure that I would advise a general readership like yours to read Cerebus.
The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I’m not sure that the last couple of generations . . . even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.
As a central example, they don’t want to examine feminism as a philosophy; they want to re-experience it as a new phenomenon. For obvious reasons. It doesn’t work, so there’s a very strong urge to go back 30 years to when it seemed that it might work.
Because my work discusses feminism and disapproves of feminism, it is important from the leftist standpoint to destroy Dave Sim as an individual and to ignore his work.
I’m so used to being misunderstood and I’m usually a ‘minority of one’ that I have this compulsion to try to explain myself as thoroughly as possible — to really try to break through that Marxist-feminist sensibility that always chooses ‘not thinking’ whenever it's presented with facts that don’t fit the Marxist-feminist program.
I don’t ‘feel.’ If I ‘felt,’ I would never have gotten the book done. I’d be off ‘feeling’ somewhere. My best intellectual assessment of the completed work is that I said exactly what I wanted to say, exactly the way I wanted to say it.
At this point, I think history will do most of the dirty work. Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization.
Arguably, over the next year or so, [my personal worldview] will probably result in a Cerebus version of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for those sorts of people who would rather collapse themselves around a lie than face the possible existence of an alternate truth which suits the given facts. That is to say, leftists.
[W]hen you’re dealing with feminism, you’re dealing with women, and that means if you frame a persuasive argument with which they disagree, they will, instead, indulge in character assassination.
Married guys, boyfriends, newly divorced guys, and guys — like Cerebus — who are permanently stuck on a chick that they might never even have slept with, or they might have broken up with 10 years before, are like that. Part chick. . . . I finally stopped hanging around with guys when I realized that they were all just waiting for the next one to come along and stick an ice-pick in their brain.
I got closer to the end of Cerebus, I started examining it as if it were a math problem. I got X and Y figured out and made some progress structurally, and then I hit the brick wall of feminism. I live in a society that believes feminism is workable. They literally won’t read anything unless it’s founded on an outright lie. . . . I’m afraid I’m going to have to wait for my society to grow up.
Does anybody know what he means when he says “feminism”? Does anybody even know what planet he’s been stationed on?
I read that entire interview and then read his Tangents rant and I'm still not sure what the hell he means, except that his ex-wife really must've worked him over.
I think (think, not feel!) the funniest part was when the interviewer asked "Are there parts of your story that you would still like to address, or perspectives that you feel you haven't yet had the chance to get across?" He gets two paragraphs of worth of "there you go again" going, and then she says, "no, that's not what I meant." And he's forced to respond with "Oh, no. Sorry, I misunderstood."